Monday, August 20, 2007

Another Leftist blames Israel

British Liberal politician, Jenny Tonge, is best known for her remark that the "pro-Israeli lobby has got it financial grips on the Western World" -- a classic bit of antisemitism in which the money-grubbing Jew is pictured as controlling the world's financial system. So it should come as no surprise to see the following fantasy from her:

"The Palestinians have been brought to their knees. A cultured and well-educated society with high skill levels has been reduced to a Third-World country. The statistics are there for all to see."

I have no doubt that there have always been some cultured and well-educated Palis but to call cultured and well-educated a society mainly made up of peasant farmers and goatherders is just the usual Leftist lying propaganda.

Tonge is more airheaded than most, however. Leftists are supposed to love primitive tribes but she forgot that bit after a trip to Botswana paid for by an agency of the Botswana government. Speaking of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen of the Kalahari, she suggested they were trying to "stay in the Stone Age", described them "primitive" and said they were "holding the government of Botswana to ransom" by refusing to be evicted from their lands. The Left rounded on her over that so her latest fanciful remarks may be an attempt to restore her credit in Leftist circles.

Cosmic rays vary over an 11 year cycle with the sunspot cycle. Dr. Svensmark developed a theory that the Sun is a significant driver of climate change through its effects on the cosmic ray flux and cloud cover. The increased solar wind and magnetic field during times of high sunspot count repels cosmic rays that otherwise would hit the Earth's atmosphere, resulting is less aerosols in the lower atmosphere and thereby reducing low cloud formation. Fewer low clouds allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth's surface causing warming.

The BBC article presents this graphic:

The BBC article is misleading because the graph titled "Cosmic ray count" is not of cosmic rays (neutrons) count at all. It is the result of a mathematical manipulation to eliminate the 11 year cosmic ray cycle. The curve is taken from the Lockwood paper. The actual cosmic ray count from the Climax neutron monitor is shown as the blue curve below.

Note that the cosmic ray count shown above is identical to that given in the Svensmark paper shown below. The red curve shown below is the cosmic ray count variation. The blue line shows variations in global cloud cover.

The Lockwood paper is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. The paper states "Hence, all solar trends since 1987 have been in the opposite direction to those seen or inferred in the majority of the twentieth century—particularly in the first half of that century".

This is not true for cosmic rays which shows very low counts during the 1990-1991 solar maximum; lower counts than the previous three cycles. This would have caused warming during the 1990's. The paper states "The Earth’s surface air temperature does not respond to the solar cycle."

This is false; the earth temperature does respond to the solar cycle as confirmed by numerous studies. The 11 year solar cycle is clearly shown in sediment cores obtained from Effington Inlet, Vancouver Island, B.C. by Dr. Tim Patterson, and in records of the Nile River, to name just two studies.

The paper continues with "Even a large amplitude modulation would be heavily damped in the global mean temperature record by the long thermal time constants associated with parts of the climate system, in particular the oceans (Wigley & Raper 1990)."

This is true. The oceans act as a hugh climate flywheel, which both smoothes and delays the effects of the climate forcings. Global temperatures do not react strongly to each 11 year cycle, but are smoothed out. Here is the World 1970 - 2006 land and sea-surface temperature data from HadCRUT3 database.

You can clearly see that when the cosmic ray counts are high, there is a temperature drop, 1974-77, 1986-87, 1995-97, and 2004 - 2006. The pink straight line best fit indicates 0.1880 Celsius per decade.

The Lockwood paper manipulates the cosmic ray count data to eliminate the 11 year cycle by extrapolating between the nodes of the cycles. The nodes are points where the top part of the cycle has the same mean as the lower part, approximately the midpoint of each cycle. The result is the "Cosmic ray count" graph shown in the BBC article and reproduced above. Note that this reveals a 22 year cycle. But totally eliminating the 11 year cycle implies that the damping effect of the oceans is near infinite, which would also eliminate a 22 year cycle, or any other cycle length. If the oceans really had a near infinite heat capacity, it would absorb all effects of the Sun and CO2 changes and global temperatures would not change! Lockwood essentially applies a 100% damping to the 11 year cycle but 0% damping to the 22 year cycle, which is complete nonsense.

The ocean's flywheel damping effect means that the temperature today is effected by the Suns activity over the last many years. The 2006 global temperature is effected mostly by the 2006 Sun's intensity, but also by the Sun's activity in previous years. Even the Sun's activity 20 years ago has an effect on the current temperature.

Below is a graph showing a hypothetical increase followed by a decrease in the Sun's forcing, and the resulting temperature change. The graph is only for illustrative purposes to show the climate smoothing and time lag effects on temperature. The units are arbitrary. Here I assume the temperature of a given year is effected by the Sun's forcing over the previous 24 years such that each prior year has 85% of the weighting of the next year.

Note that the temperature continues to rise for several years after the Sun's forcing starts to decrease.

The Lockwood paper falsely assumes that the current Sun activity would have an immediate effect on temperature without a time lag. One should expect a time lag based on the length of the variation cycle. For example, each day the Sun's intensity peaks at noon but daily temperatures peak several hours later. Each year the Sun's intensity peaks at June 21, but July and August are the warmest months in the northern hemisphere.

The 11 year solar cycle causes about a 2 year lag in the temperature variation. The Sun's activity has been increasing though most of the twentieth century and one should expect about a decade of time lag. The graph below from here show the rising solar flux during most of the twentieth century.

Since the cosmic ray count was a minimum in 1991 (the 2001-2002 minimum count was higher) we expect the temperature to increase for about a decade to about 2001 before falling. This is exactly what has happened!

All climatologists should know the the heat capacity of the oceans cause a large time lag in temperature response. The IPCC fourth assessment report includes computer model projections that show if the CO2 concentration is held constant at year 2000 levels, the global temperature will continue to rise over the next two decades. The same effect occurs for Sun activity as CO2.

Lockwood compares the cosmic ray (with the 11 year cycle removed) to a smoothed surface temperature graph. The Sun's climate forcings should be compared to the actual temperature curves, which show no increase in global temperatures since 2002.

The surface temperatures used by Lockwood are contaminated by the heat island effects and numerous quality control issues related to the individual station measurements and spatial placements. Lockwood should use the MSU (Microwave Sounding Units) satellite data which is truly a global measure of temperatures, as it is the troposphere temperature, and is not contaminated by the heat island effect.

The theory of CO2 temperature change shows that the enhanced greenhouse effect would increase temperatures faster in the troposphere where temperatures are cold and the water vapour content is low. All the climate models show that the troposphere temperatures should increase faster than the surface temperatures, especially in the tropics. The graph below shows the temperature in the tropics.

The three curves are scaled so that the average of the first 5 years are the same. The GHCN curve is the land only surface temperature trend. It shows the highest rate of increase because it is contaminated by the heat island effect. The HadCRUT3 curve is the land and sea surface temperature trend. It is lower that the GHCN curve because the sea temperature data does not have any heat island effect. If the Sun had little effect on climate and CO2 was responsible for the twentieth century temperature rise, both of these curves should show a lower warming trend than the MSU, troposphere temperature, curve! It is illogical to believe that CO2 is the primary temperature driver and concurrently believe that the surface measurements are accurate.

The Lockwood paper only analyses the last 30 years of data which is too short of a time interval. A system that has 11 year cycles requires at least 110 years (10 cycles) of data to obtain meaningful statistical results.

The paper says in the conclusions "... there was a detectable influence of solar variability in the first half of the twentieth century". The BBC article quote Lockwood "It [the cosmic ray effect] might even have had a significant effect on pre-industrial climate; but you cannot apply it to what we're seeing now, because we're in a completely different ball game." The paper fails to explain what laws of physics have recently changed.

Solar activity correlates well with temperature over longer time scales. The graph below from Scafetta and West of Duke University compares solar proxies with the Northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction by Moberg et al. [2005].

Solar activity can account for at least 50% of the warming since 1900. It is likely that both the Sun/Cosmic rays and CO2 emissions are affecting climate.

In summary, the Lockwood paper is seriously flawed by:

1. It falsely says the Sun's influence peaked by 1987. The cosmic ray count in 1991 is the lowest it has ever been, causing warming.

2. It falsely says the Earth's temperature does not respond to solar cycles.

3. It eliminates the 11 year solar cycle from the cosmic ray data, but does not smooth any other cycle.

4. It fails to account for the large time lag between the Sun forcings and temperature changes.

This paper is so flawed that it is remarkable that it was published. My conclusion is that the recent Sun and cosmic ray data is entirely consistent with the position that the Sun is the primary driver of climate change.

Last year, former Tory minister George Walden wrote a book about the future of life in Britain and why record numbers were emigrating. Taking the form of a letter from a father to his son, it provoked a massive, positive response from readers when it was serialised in the Daily Mail. In the book, Guy and Catherine despaired at having to bring up their two children in an area that had been dramatically changed by mass immigration, where their children had become a minority in school and teachers struggled to deal with so many pupils who did not speak English. The country - where 57 per cent of births in the capital are now to mothers who were born abroad - seemed to be failing them on multiple fronts, not just on education but also on security and health care.

Since then, the couple have given up the battle and moved abroad to Canada. And they are not alone in their decision. As Walden pointed out in the first serialisation, a total of 350,000 people left Britain in 2004 - equivalent to a third of the population of Birmingham.

Walden observes that despite all the changes mass immigration has brought in Britain, there remains a conspiracy of silence that has stifled debate on one of the most important issues of our age. Now, in this thought-provoking followup, Walden examines Guy and Catherine's new quality of life, using it as a mirror to reflect the dreadful state of Britain today.

Walden, who served as higher education minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, has been married to Sarah for 38 years and they have three grown-up children. The son to whom his letters are addressed is fictional, but the incidents affecting him and his wife are based on fact.

Dear Son,

It's getting on for ten months now since you and Catherine left for a new life in Canada. And we didn't get the impression, when we came to see you, that you've regretted your decision for a moment. Still, I'd better avoid saying anything excessively encouraging about the state of the nation you've left behind. Not difficult, as it happens. In fact, it looks as though you got out just in time. Driving close to your old place in West London the other day, I saw a police notice asking for information about a young man who'd brandished a gun at an officer. The people who bought your house at a ludicrously high price are unlikely to be thrilled. I don't suppose there's another city in the world where people have to pay that kind of money for the privilege of living in an area where hoodlums go round flashing guns.

There is an atmosphere of suppressed - or outright - violence and disorder that makes me worry for the next generation. Often, it's the little incidents that are telling. Yesterday, your mother was on a bus when three girls aged between 16 and 18 tried to board in Ladbroke Grove. They were Brazilians, she thinks, but so completely anglicised that they'd got themselves roaring - or rather squealing - drunk. Toting bottles of vodka and plastic cups, they pressed on to the platform, but the Bangladeshi driver stalwartly refused to allow them to board. The bus was held up for 20 minutes while the girls blocked the doors, laughing and screaming obscenities in their newly-acquired Essex accents. The point is that during all this little drama, not a single one of the weary rush-hour passengers said a word. The great British public held hostage by a trio of sozzled teenage girls! .........

Here, the country is not so much disintegrating as disaggregating. The Balkanisation of our lives is happening on a national scale. Scotland's falling off the top, self-sealing ethnic communities are proliferating in the Midlands, and London's got its own thing going at the bottom.

We boast of our prosperity, but it's fragile and concentrated in the South East - an island within our island. Perhaps we'll have to get used to thinking of London and its environs as a kind of Hong Kong or an Italian city state.

Here, the most obvious disconnection is between the rich and the rest. An old story, but the difference today is that the fate of those at the top is divorced from those lower down. When the housing ramp collapses, most of the falling masonry will hit the little guys in the middle and at the bottom. The top London prices helped drive up the entire market, but are less likely to fall when it all comes down. There's no feeling that we're all in this together.

The divisions run from earliest youth to grim old age. More boys at Eton get five good GCSEs, I hear, than in the entire borough of Hackney. And now there's another divide growing up: between those who have a decent pension to look forward to and those for whom longevity has become more a threat than a promise.

Then there's the widening gap between the married and unmarried, or rather those with children and those without. Large areas of our towns are now such havens of hedonism for the money-flashing singles that they're pretty much out of bounds for the poor bloody infantry who keep procreation going and cannot afford such leisures. Everything's geared to the needs of the drinker and consumer, and little to the couple with the buggy. On top of all this is the growing disconnection between politics and the people.

And the more fractured we become, the greater our pretence of togetherness to cover it up. That's why the Government bangs on about 'community' and has tried so hard to ignore the problems caused by immigration. Imagine my astonishment when the Minister responsible, Liam Byrne, actually admitted recently that large-scale immigration has profoundly unsettled the country - and that it's the poorest communities that have suffered the most. The influx was overwhelming public services, schools, the NHS and housing, he said. If Labour failed to address public concern, he concluded, it could lose the next election......

Meanwhile, the Government continues to pour billions into the NHS. That's supposed to be another success story, but nobody can really explain where all the money's going, let alone why it's so hard to keep our hospitals clean. Let me tell you what happened to me recently. As you know, for years I've suffered from that irritating condition Dupuytren's contracture (named after a Frenchman) - or claw-hand in its less distinguished appellation, because the fingers contract until they look like one. There's no pain - it's just a bloody nuisance, not least because after you've had an operation for one finger, the next one starts to contract.

I've had two fingers treated, one on the NHS and the other private - because I didn't fancy going into hospital for a minor operation, catching MRSA and coming out dead, as thousands are now doing. Anyway, another damned finger began curling last year, so I went to my NHS doctor and - after a wait - saw a consultant who told me to come back in six months to see how it was progressing. Meanwhile, I read that the French had developed a cure. So thanks to them and none at all to the NHS, 30 years of aggravation was fixed while we were in Paris in a single afternoon by injection, for the sum of about 60 pounds - with no pain, no anaesthetic, no hospital operation and no maddening sling.....

If the economy falters - and the signs are beginning to show - the social consequences of unemployment don't bear thinking about. And, this time, people who are laid off won't be able to retire early because Gordon Brown has blocked that avenue of escape by b*****ing up their pensions. Even now, with the economy still riding high, a record number of people are leaving the country to start again elsewhere. Think what will happen to emigration figures if the economic bubble is pricked.

Whether it is or not, we can certainly expect the splits and cracks in society to grow. Which leaves people your age with three choices: resign themselves to a life in a perilously fragmented community, get rich or do as you have done and get out. Politics or parenting, schools or Scotland, wherever you look, very little seems to be holding things together. People live side by side yet separately, in mental isolation, with their eyes fixed warily on one another. When communities, races, classes and families become segregated to the degree they have, feelings of social solidarity erode. Society ends up like a shattered windscreen: holding together by the grace of God, even though it's all cracked to hell, so no one can see ahead or have any idea where they are going.

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.

Some TERMINOLOGY for non-British readers: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".

Again for American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security

Consensus. Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 speech: "For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus."... To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

For my sins I have always loved G.B. Shaw's witty comment: "No Englishman can open his mouth without causing another Englishman to despise him". But Shaw was Irish, of course.

Britain has enormous claims to fame -- most of which the Labour goverment has been doing its best to destroy. But one glory no-one can destroy is British humour. And if you don't "get" British humour, your life is a dreary desert indeed. A superb sample here

Here is a link to my favourite British political speech since WWII. It is by Nigel Farage, the Leader of the UK Independence Party. He is referring to the Fascistic decision by the EU parliament to act as if their huge new "constitution" had been approved by the voters when in fact majorities in France, Ireland and Nederland (Holland) have rejected it at the ballot box. He points out that abuse is all they have to offer when he points out the impropriety of their actions.

Farage's expression, "A complete shower" is British slang meaning a group of completely incompetent and useless failures. It originated in the British armed forces where its unabbreviated version was "A complete shower of sh*t".

Britain appears to be the first country where anti-patriotism gained strong hold. Even Friedich Engels (the co-worker with Karl Marx who died in 1895) was a furious German patriot. Much of the British elite were anti-patriotic from the early 20th century onwards, however. The "Cambridge spies" (from one of Britain's two most prestigious universities) are a good example of that. Although Cambridge appears to have been the chief nest of spies-to-be in Britain of the 30s, however, Oxford was also very Leftist. In 1933 (9th Feb.) the Oxford Union debated the motion: "This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country". The motion was overwhelmingly carried (275 to 153).

I have an abiding fascination with the Church of England. It is the sort of fascination one might have for a once-distinguished elderly relative who has gone bad and become a slave to the bottle. But nothing I can say about the C of E (which these days seems to stand for The Church of the Environment) could surpass what the whole of English literature says of it -- which ranges from seeing it as a collection of nincompoops and incompetents to seeing it as comprised of evil hypocrites. Yet its 39 "Articles of Religion" of 1562 are an abiding and eloquent statement of Protestant faith. But I guess that 1562 is a long time ago.

Links about antisemitism in 21st century Britain here and here and here

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could well have been thinking of modern Britain when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

My academic background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

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